Parents should take good care of their kids and it is totally not advisable to leave them in cars. Every year, about 38 children (under the age of 15) die from heatstroke after being left ‘unattended in a hot car’ according to KidsAndCars.org, which is a national nonprofit organisation focused on keeping kids safe in and around vehicles.
It means one child every nine days. Overall, more than 900 children died this way since 1990. Shockingly, the number of child hot car deaths so far in 2019 is 48.
In order to prevent all these mishaps, a 10-year-old Texas boy by the name of Bishop Curry invented a device that could assist children forgotten in hot cars from heat-related deaths. Bishop added that he was inspired to think about the issue after he heard about a child in a neighbouring city who passed away after being left in a hot minivan last year.
Bishop is a fifth-grader at Melissa Ridge Intermediate School and the son of Bishop IV who is an operational excellence manager and process engineer at Toyota Financial Services in Plano, Texas.
After learning about the child who died, he sketched a masterplan in a bid to invent a life-saving device. He had also asked his father to find someone at the car company who could offer much-needed assistance to work on it with him.
“I heard about babies dying in car seats and they could have grown up to be somebody important,” the 10-year-old told Toyota. “It makes me pretty upset.”
Bishop’s device “Oasis” would link up to a child’s car seat or a seat in the vehicle. If suppose a child was left inside a hot car, it would instantly blow cold air on the baby in order to prevent overheating while at the same time, alerting emergency workers and the child’s parents.
Bishop is in the design stage, but he has made a clay prototype and a provisional patent. Bishop and his family members have also visited the Center for Child Injury Prevention Studies’ annual conference to present the life-saving concept.
Bishop’s father told NBC that he understands how the unlucky accident could happen to any parent in the world. “Sometimes babies fall asleep and they’re really quiet, so if you’re rushing home from work or you’re rushing to the grocery store, I could see how somebody could forget,” Curry IV said.
He hopes that his son’s invention will help save lives. Bishop and his family established a GoFundMe campaign to create awareness of the device and money for the patent and manufacturing stage. Thanks to the staggering $46,000 that Bishop raised on GoFundMe.
“I know what it feels like to lose a family member that’s really close to you,” the 10-year-old Bishop said about the passing of his grandfather. “I don’t want anybody else to feel that.”
